


Thank You, Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle

by robotsfighting



Category: Glee
Genre: 3.01 TPPP, Gen, M/M, reaction fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-23
Updated: 2011-09-23
Packaged: 2017-10-23 23:25:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotsfighting/pseuds/robotsfighting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine's roommate is kind of a Nerd Sage; he doesn't look the part, but he gives extremely good advice. After his conversation on the first day of school with Kurt in the Lima Bean, Blaine goes to Joseph, and they talk about Princess Peach, Bowser, and the Kobayashi Maru. SPOILERS for episode 3.01, The Purple Piano Project.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thank You, Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Super Mario Bros., and also a [song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbYyTlz1Tw) by The Mountain Goats.

Joseph always got to their room first. Blaine didn’t know how he did it, probably some kind of primitive magic, but he always managed to be in and unpacked before Blaine had even set eyes on the dorm building. Blaine could tell it was the same story this year, because Joe’s white board was already attached to the door. In his roommate’s scrawling blue handwriting, it said, _It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an airport' appear. --Douglas Adams_. Blaine opened the door.

It was still the same as he remembered: a different room number, but the same layout, their beds on either side of the room, Joseph on the right of the door and Blaine on the left. All of Joe’s books were stacked into his bookshelf, his figurines lined up neatly on his desk. The sign was still there, hanging exactly across the room from the door, a very neatly cross-stitched cloth in a frame, with the words _This statement is false. The previous statement is true._ The first day they met, Joseph had told him about the cross-stitching; a girl at his old high school had made it for him as a going-away gift. It was supposed to keep the eventual evil robot overlords from killing him the second they broke through the door; the paradox of the statements would blow their little robot brains when they set their artificial eyes on the sign. Blaine had thought the gift was a work of genius, particularly the fact that it was _cross-stitched_ , like a Bible verse on the wall of a southern housewife.

Joseph was on his bed, hunched over his computer. He grinned when Blaine closed the door, but didn’t look up. “I’d ask how your summer was, but I’m pretty sure it just involved a lot of making out with Kurt.”

Blaine smiled a little weakly, setting his keys and bag on his empty bedside table. He hated this part, before he had anything of his in the room. It was all still piled into his car, waiting for the evening when the Warblers all tended to help each other out, carrying boxes and bags up the stairs for each person, one at a time, so that they didn’t have to move themselves in alone. But it left his side bare and too white and strange, and he sat gingerly on the edge of the naked mattress, clasping his hands between his knees. “I take it from the whiteboard that you didn’t have a pleasant flight?”

“Montana to Ohio is never a ‘pleasant flight,’ Blainers,” Joe said, clicking something on his laptop. “Especially when they try to make you pay for two seats.”

Blaine frowned. “They tried--”

“I swear to god, the woman at the counter looked me up and down and said, ‘Oh, I’m not sure if you’re going to be able to fit, my dear.’” Joe finally looked up then, smirking at Blaine. “First, who talks like that? Second, I totally fit. It’s a squeeze, but it’s an adventure.” Blaine smiled at that, but Joseph still paused and frowned at him. “Why do you look like someone’s been peeing in your cornflakes?”

Blaine sighed, falling back against the bed. “I don’t even know what that looks like. Sad? Disgusted?”

“Did you and Kurt break up over the summer? Please tell me you didn’t. He’s the only person I know who could probably make me a convincing Starfleet uniform for Halloween.”

Blaine shook his head, staring up at the ceiling. The paint was a little cracked, spiderwebbing across the surface in thin gray lines. “We didn’t break up. It’s going really well.”

Or, it was, until Kurt sat at a table with him that morning and told Blaine he wanted this year to be magic. _Every moment of every day with you._ Which was amazing and heart-stopping, and he’d reached out to take Kurt’s hand, but the pretty-much-constant battle in his head and chest had started up again, louder than ever, like knights fighting for either side with swords and long metal lances, all jangling noises, setting his nerves on edge.

“I’m glad?” Joseph asked, raising an eyebrow. He closed his computer and set it on his bedside table, swinging around to sit against the wall and face Blaine. “What’s got you so miserable, man?”

Blaine closed his eyes. Joseph had always had this sage-like quality about him, ever since Blaine met him on his first day at Dalton. It was like he’d reached Nirvana, at some point in the past. He was like the Buddha, if the Buddha wore t-shirts with binary on them. He listened, and he gave good advice, and he never judged, even when Blaine was actually just being an idiot. It was sort of a weird quality for a guy with a collection of Doctor Who figures, but Blaine appreciated it, way more than he could ever actually articulate. He sighed. “Kurt wants me to transfer to McKinley. And I want to go, too.”

He heard Joseph laugh a little. “Yes, I can see how that would be a huge problem.”

Blaine sat up, frowning at him. “I can’t leave Dalton. I can’t just – I’ve spent the last two years here, and the Warblers, and everything this school offers--”

“You mean how everything’s made of rainbows and they have to chase the unicorns off of the tennis courts every morning?” Joseph asked, smirking, eyebrows raised.

Blaine faltered. “Safe,” he said, unbidden, the word falling out of his mouth and hitting the floor with an almost audible leaden thump. “It’s – I’m safe here.”

Joseph’s eyebrows drew together. “Do they have lasers in the hallways at McKinley or something?”

Blaine let out a breath. His hands squeezed at each other between his knees, knuckles whitening, his head ducked. The knights had reached some kind of stalemate to see what Blaine would do now, and the silence rang in his head, echoing and uncomfortable and too big. He swallowed. “I never actually told you why I transferred,” he said quietly.

Joseph paused. “I figured it was for some kind of bullying,” he said, sort of gentle. “You had some serious bruises when you got here.”

Blaine nodded. He swallowed again, his throat suddenly very dry and too constricted, his tie feeling too tight. He hadn’t told this story since he’d told it to Kurt, and before Kurt he hadn’t told this story, full stop, to anyone who wasn’t there that night. It still made him feel overhot and nervous, his stomach twisting, his whole body humming unpleasantly. Idly he wondered, somewhere, if that would ever go away. Probably not. “I was beaten up,” he said, staring down at the rug Joe had brought to cover the cold linoleum. “I went to a dance with a boy, and three guys jumped us in the parking lot. They were football players, but I never saw their faces, and I--” His voice died. He cleared his throat. “I transferred that week, because I didn’t want to go back to school and see them. And I was tired of being pushed in the hallway and washing _fag_ off of my locker every day and I was just tired of being _scared_ all the time.”

Silence hung suspended in the room, and Blaine breathed into it, letting his eyes fall shut again. Whoever said talking about your feelings made you feel better was a vicious liar. Blaine felt hollowed out and empty, a little raw.

“I wondered why you looked like you were dying last year, the week before you and Kurt went to prom,” Joseph murmured.

Blaine laughed faintly, looking up. “Jeff drew the short straw on that particular conversation.”

Joseph smiled a little. “They called me Jabba at my old school. Actually, a lot of them called me Java, because they had no idea what they were talking about, but that didn’t really matter when you were teasing the fat nerd. When the teachers started to think that was my real name, I thought that maybe a change was in order.” He folded his legs in front of him, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back against the wall. “I get it,” he said, looking Blaine in the eye. “Not from personal experience, obviously, because you’re just on a whole other level of why public schools suck. But I get why you’re scared. Kurt never really kept his reasons for coming to Dalton to himself, and you could be walking right into the same kind of bullshit you dealt with at your old school.”

“Only worse,” Blaine said quietly. “Because it might make things worse for Kurt, too.”

Joseph nodded. “Yeah. That, too.” He watched Blaine for a moment, and Blaine looked back at him, waiting. After a long pause, Joe shrugged. “Look, Blaine. You’ve got to do what’s gonna make you the most happy. If you think that staying at Dalton and singing girl songs in rooms with seriously the weirdest tapestries ever is going to do it for you, then stay. Keep yourself all safe and sheltered until you can graduate and move to New York and do whatever you want to do with your life. If you think that transferring to McKinley to be with Kurt and all of his insane friends and the possibility of someone saying or doing something cruel to you is the better option, then go.”

Blaine groaned, half-covering his face with his hands. “Well when you put it like that.”

Joseph grinned at him, all teeth. “This is your very own Kobayashi Maru, Blainers. You kind of pulled a Kirk when you transferred to Dalton. You reprogrammed your life so that you wouldn’t have to deal with the fact that really bad things can and probably _will_ happen to you. I’m not gonna tell you to go back to a place that’s hurt you before, but – that’s a lesson you’re going to have to learn, at some point. Dalton isn’t what real battle is like. No-win scenarios exist.” He shrugged, spreading his hands. “If you have a chance to be with someone you really love, in a setting that sounds pretty awful, then that’s a really awesome opportunity to learn how to actually deal. You've got to make peace with the fact that not everything's going to be safe for the rest of your life. Do you think that no one in New York is a homophobe?”

Blaine winced. He looked away, at the sign on the far wall. _This statement is false. The previous statement is true._ Joe was right, he was obviously right, but that didn’t make anything less completely terrifying. New York was supposed to be this shining beacon of forward-thinking ideals, or at least a place where no one cared enough to do anything about two men holding hands on the subway. He and Kurt had been putting so much stock into that idea lately, when they had to walk close-but-not-too-close through the mall, stay in the light in the movie theater parking lot. Someday they were going to be free of this stupid place.

“Blaine,” Joe murmured, and Blaine looked at him, dragging his eyes slowly over, suddenly exhausted. Joe’s mouth twitched. “I think you already know what you’re going to do. I’ve seen the way you look at Kurt. You’ve got it bad.” He grinned. “Your princess is in another castle, Mario. You would totally go up against Bowser for him, a million times.”

The idea washed over Blaine, as he sat there on his empty side of the room. He would. Really. He would defeat the king of the Koopas, unite the Triforce pieces and reduce Ganon to a pile of ash, beat Gary Oak after the Elite Four. He would take on pretty much any enemy thrown at him if it meant sidling up next to Kurt’s locker every single morning and seeing his face light up. Eating lunch with Kurt in McKinley’s weird stone courtyard. Singing with him at glee club. He let out a breath like it was being dragged away from him.

“You just want a single,” he managed.

Joseph actually laughed. “Nah,” he said brightly. “They’ll probably saddle me with another lost little gay kid.”

Blaine smiled at him. Joseph smiled back, and they stayed like that for a minute. Then Blaine stood up, reaching for his bag and his keys.

“Where you going?” Joe asked, sounding like he already knew the answer.

Blaine sighed. “To see the Warblers, then have a really tense, awkward conversation with my parents.”

Joseph grinned. It was fond, and bright, and it hit Blaine right in the chest, making his breath come a little harder. “I’m really proud of you, dude. I’m really happy for you.”

Blaine smiled at him, and those were totally not tears in his eyes. “You're a really great roommate, Joseph. Really, really great.”

Joseph’s grin widened, and he held up a hand with his fingers parted down the middle, in the Vulcan salute, like Spock. “Live long and prosper, buddy,” he said.

In the doorway, Blaine held up his own salute. “Live long and prosper.” He waited for a moment, then he ducked out into the hallway, moving a few steps before stopping and taking a wet little breath. He pressed his hands over his eyes, feeling his face heating up beneath his palms.

“Blaine!”

He turned around to see Joseph hanging halfway out of the door. He was smiling a little softer. “You’re not going away forever, man,” he said quietly.

Blaine straightened up, swallowing past whatever was blocking his throat. He nodded. “I – yeah. I know.”

“The Warblers aren’t going to let you just disappear. They’re all insane. They’ll camp outside of your house.”

Blaine laughed despite himself. “I know.”

“And I have your email. And you have Skype. And I still need to teach you how to play Magic.”

Blaine softened. “I know,” he said again.

Joseph stepped out into the hallway and wrapped his arms tightly around Blaine, then lifted him up off of his feet. Blaine hugged back as well as he could. It was the first time he’d ever seen Joseph hug anybody, and it was kind of amazing, and he couldn’t help but laugh into it, suddenly so ridiculously happy. He’d just made this decision, this big decision that could potentially end in total disaster and misery for everyone involved, but he was _so happy_. It filled him up, like helium, making him feel weightless and free.

“You’re not running away from anything this time,” Joseph whispered, very close to his ear.

And he wasn’t. God, he wasn’t. For once, ever, he was running _toward_ something he really, really wanted. More than anything. So he laughed again, and hugged back tighter.

“I _know_.”

He wasn’t running away.


End file.
